Design, Modeling and Numerical Analysis of Corrugated Split Tube in Tube Metal Hydride Hydrogen Storage Reactor

Abstract

The hydrogen absorption and desorption in metal hydride is a strong exothermic and endothermic reaction, thus in order to obtain efficient storage performance of storage system, the thermal management of the system is a technical demand. The continuous efforts are going on obtaining efficient heat and mass transfer, with different kinds of heat exchangers incorporated in the reactor system. In this paper, a two-dimensional analysis of a cylindrical reactor hydride bed by splitting into pieces and with corrugations is presented using ANSYS Fluent. The numerical model is validated with the experimental data reported in the literature and showed good agreement. Results showed that splitting configuration of hydride bed illustrates better cooling of metal hydride bed leading to faster reaction rate than that of single piece hydride bed. The absorption time is reduced by 10 % for a three pieces configuration at the supply pressure of 30 bar and cooling fluid temperature 298 K than the single-piece reactor. Results are also presented for different operating conditions. The numerical analysis reveals that three pieces corrugated configuration resulted in the best charging performance at the supply pressure of 30 bar and cooling fluid temperature of 288 K.